Keir Hardie, a coal miner from the age of ten, went on to become the first Labour Member of Parliament in 1892. He later represented Merthyr Tydfil from 1900 until his death in 1915. In 1906, he was elected to lead twenty-eight other Labour Party MPs in the Commons, but resigned within two years as internal rivalries developed. Yet Kenneth O. Morgan argues that Hardie contributed more to the rise of Labour as a political force than any other man. For all his passionate crusading, he was a pragmatic strategist who concentrated his political efforts on increasing Labour representation in Parliament, which in turn laid the road to power. He knew how and when to use industrial protest and popular protest to good effect. It was also Hardie who provided many of the policy platforms – unemployment and poverty, women’s and racial equality, decolonisation, devolution and internationalism – on which Labour would contest elections for many subsequent generations. More than any other Labour leader, he became a legend, greatly revered.
• • •
Keir Hardie was a founder not a leader. Like the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in general, his democratic instincts rebelled against the very idea of leadership. This view swayed the Labour Party in its early years. Not until 1922 did it confer the title of ‘leader’ (rather than solely ‘chairman’) onto one of its members – significantly, it was Ramsay MacDonald who first received this accolade. Hardie was a crusader, an evangelist and an idealist, who disliked the compromises of parliamentary leadership and the business details that went with it. Thus, the Liberal journalist A. G. Gardiner wrote in somewhat exaggerated terms in 1908 that Hardie ‘was the one man in the PLP who was unqualified to lead it’.66 Hardie’s intimate colleague John Bruce Glasier wrote that being the first chairman of the party in 1906–7 was ‘a seat of misery’ for his friend.67 Glasier, indeed, did not want him to be the chairman at all, but rather wanted him to reserve himself as an inspirational force in promoting socialism. But Hardie, however reluctantly, felt it was his duty to stand, since otherwise the party would be led by a non-socialist trade unionist like David Shackleton. In the end, Hardie defeated Shackleton by fifteen to fourteen on a second vote. The first vote had been a tie – fourteen all – and it seems to have been MacDonald, who abstained the first time, who cast the decisive vote.68
Hardie gave up the chairmanship with much relief at the end of 1907, during a lengthy tour around the world that took him to Canada, Japan, the Straits Settlements, India and South Africa – far removed from the parliamentary pressures of Westminster. In India, in particular, he was greeted by massive crowds and, in Madras especially, as a Christ-like prophet: ‘I honestly believe that I am being worshipped in certain quarters.’ It was all a far cry from the fractious pressures of London politics.69
His period of leadership had seen the party achieve some notable victories in the Commons, principally the passage of the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 to reverse the Taff Vale verdict. This act was in fact the Labour Party’s own, substituted for the government’s more limited bill, and was sponsored by Shackleton and backed by Hardie, among others. It safeguarded trade union funds by giving the unions complete financial immunity in the event of industrial disputes and strike action; it was hailed as ‘the Magna Carta of Labour’.
But, in general, his period as party chairman was an unhappy and unproductive time for Hardie. It led to much criticism from MacDonald, Henderson and others for his seemingly wayward and unbusinesslike methods. He came under fire for his gestures of support towards Victor Grayson, an erratic loose cannon of far-left views and demagogic style, who actually won a sensational by-election victory at Colne Valley in 1907, much to the Labour Party’s embarrassment. Grayson soon proved to be an impossible colleague in the Commons.
Hardie’s involvement with the suffragettes also led to much criticism of him at the 1907 annual party conference, which provoked his dramatic, perhaps melodramatic, threat that he would resign as party chairman. There was also disagreement with Hardie’s decision to go abroad on his lengthy world tour, leaving his colleagues to labour on as best they could in his absence. MacDonald saw it as a form of vanity on Hardie’s part – though of course he himself was a political prima donna par excellence. To his own relief, Hardie’s decision to resign as chairman took effect while he was abroad, and he was succeeded in January 1908 by the far more organised figure of Arthur Henderson.
After all this, John Burns, an undistinguished Cabinet minister, was to claim, with much exaggeration, that Hardie, who had never run anything greater than the Auchinleck school board, had no practical achievements to his name. The title he deserved, claimed Burns sourly, was ‘Barren Cumnock in the Duchy of Doctrinaire’.70 Of course, Burns ignored the skills required for the founding of the Labour Party, to which he himself had been strongly opposed.
But it was certainly the case that Hardie was temperamentally disinclined to focus on the need to communicate with other parties and groups or to follow the path of strategic compromise. In addition, the minutiae of day-to-day parliamentary business were not something to which he naturally put his mind. He differed from both MacDonald and Henderson in this respect. Hardie as leader was an agitator, not an operator.
As a parliamentary colleague, Hardie, like others in the distinctly unfraternal early Labour Party (Henderson and Philip Snowden, for instance, and MacDonald especially), could pose difficulties, sometimes creating problems for party discipline. He was a temperamental, often moody Lowlander, whose relations with that other prickly Scot, the Highlander Ramsay MacDonald, were often volatile. Mavericks in the ranks, such as George Lansbury, who resigned his seat to fight a losing by-election at Bow & Bromley, or even the rebellious Victor Grayson, would often turn to Hardie for some moral support.
Hardie was, in any case, a very private, complex man, inclined on occasions to complain about how he found political agitation (for which he had a unique gift) to be a torment and a burden. Like others in the early party, such as Frank Smith, he was prone to dabble in spiritualism.71 His marriage was an unhappy one and his relations with young female socialists were complicated and often ambiguous. Sylvia Pankhurst, with whom his relationship was physical, was only the most celebrated and intense of his various attachments.72
And yet Hardie was, by any standards, a great man in politics – an astonishing pioneer whose career transformed the face of British politics for ever. By contemporaries, he was variously compared with Christ and (by MacDonald himself) Moses, leading the children of Labour out of the wilderness and towards the Promised Land. Hardie’s suffering in 1915, during the horrors of the First World War, led to comparison73 with the sufferings of Christ at Gethsemane.
In his own fashion, therefore, Hardie was a kind of saint, and, as with Gandhi or Mandela, saints can often be difficult. He was a very shrewd saint, with extraordinary persuasive and inspirational powers. He was also a highly practical saint: witness him telling the young Fenner Brockway that his speech at party conference was very good – although it was essentially an ILP speech, not a Labour Party one.74
Despite his distaste for leadership and his personal idiosyncrasies, Keir Hardie, as orator, editor and crusader, contributed more to the rise of Labour as a political force than any other man. He was a unique moral force. In this sense, he was the greatest leader of them all.
Hardie’s career was remarkable both for his intuitive grasp of strategy and his judgement on policy. On party strategy, he showed extraordinary insight. A self-taught man who left school at the age of ten to go down the Ayrshire pits, he proved to be more perceptive and far-sighted in many key respects than the middle-class, self-proclaimed intellectuals of the Fabian Society.
First and foremost, he created the Labour Alliance. He saw that, in order to flourish, democratic socialists should make common cause with the growing ranks of the trade unions. They not only represented the direct popular voice of the industrial working class – as no other body could – but the unions were also changing their character and composition, as the relatively small ranks of Lib–Lab skilled craftsmen (often termed, not always in a complimentary way, the ‘aristocracy of labour’) were hugely swollen by the unionisation of vast numbers of unskilled and general workers: the so-called ‘New Unionism’. Trade unionists, too, had been newly radicalised by a series of judicial verdicts in the later 1890s that seemed to show the judges siding with capitalist employers and imperilling the basic right to withdraw labour. The alliance between the socialists of the ILP and the (less important) Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and trade unions was the essential foundation for the new party, and it was Hardie who was mainly responsible.
Hardie was a passionate man, but he was also a pragmatist. He insisted that the essential objective should be to win Labour representation in Parliament, rather than pursue any particular ideological programme. Shrewdly, he worked at first on the labour movement in his native Scotland, establishing key contacts with the Scottish Trade Union Congress (TUC), formed only as recently as 1897 – its chairman, Bob Smillie, was an old ILP comrade of Hardie’s from the western Scottish coalfield. In April 1899, a formal special conference of the Scottish TUC at Dundee carried a motion in favour of a new initiative for Labour representation. Critics of his attacked Hardie for ‘nobbling’ the conference. He was said to have hardly been off the platform at all, whether in moving motions or in even proposing votes of thanks to the musicians.75 But it was a decisive episode in Labour politics. It led to the British TUC conference at Plymouth in September 1899, where a motion calling for a special conference of working-class organisations to promote greater parliamentary representation was carried by 546,000 to 434,000. The motion was moved by an ILP associate of Hardie’s – a member of the hitherto cautious Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (AMRS).
The meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London, the following February took a similar view and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was founded. From the start, the trade unions were central to its operations, along with the shock and anger stirred by the Taff Vale verdict in 1901, which implied the imposition of financial penalties on the right to strike. It was Hardie’s strategic vision that brought the new body into being.
At the same time, Hardie was clear that the new party – which, in effect, it had become – should be much more than a trade union or working-class party. It should look beyond the narrow confines of ‘economism’ and embody a wider, distinctly socialist thrust, too. Hence the vital need that the trade union mass membership should work in partnership with middle-class professionals and intellectuals, as the ILP had made a point of doing ever since its foundation in Bradford in 1893.
On this basis, he welcomed the way that Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party of America had found support from intellectuals, social workers and journalists in the Progressive Movement. Labour in Britain needed the stimulus of new, radical ideas. In Hardie’s terms, Labour ‘should blend the classes into one human family’. The outstanding quality of the ILP, he wrote, was its ‘broad, tolerant catholicity’.76 The Labour Party that came into formal existence in 1906 should be broad based; indeed, the term ‘broad church’ was highly appropriate for this movement that had grown out of the popular religion of the Nonconformist chapels in areas such as the West Riding, the Lancashire textile communities and the south Welsh mining valleys. The concept was that the party should lapse into neither sterile ‘economism’ nor the faddism of doctrinaire intellectuals – it should flourish because all its varied components interacted and each played an essential part.
Second, Hardie insisted that Labour should be an independent party, although it should collaborate tactically with other parties too, of course – notably the radicals in the post-Gladstonian Liberal Party. Hardie thus gave his somewhat reluctant blessing to the secret ‘entente’ that MacDonald negotiated with the Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone in 1903, which guaranteed Labour a free run against the Conservatives in about thirty seats at the following election. In two-member seats, LRC candidates ran in double harness with Liberals, as Hardie himself did in Merthyr Tydfil in 1900, and as MacDonald did in Leicester and Philip Snowden did in Blackburn in 1906. During the later stages, Hardie even flirted with the notion of a new radical force consisting of Labour and ‘pro-Boer’ Liberals such as Lloyd George; he even contemplated the socially conservative John Morley as its possible leader, but the idea was, fortunately, soon dropped.77 Otherwise, Hardie was strong and consistent in emphasising the need for independence in structure, priorities and (thanks to the unions) finance.
There were many other scenarios against which Hardie had to contend. There were the Lib–Labs, strong in the older craft unions and also in the miners’ unions, who wanted no change, and chose to see themselves as a pivotal pressure group within a broad Liberal coalition. There were the Fabians, notably the Webbs, who did not favour a Labour Party at all at first, and preferred to see socialists as a leaven within the political world, working with allies, radical Liberals on the London county council and even, perhaps, Conservatives such as Balfour on educational reform.
The Fabians tended to keep aloof at this early stage. On trade policy, they were sympathetic to tariff reform, while Hardie and the ILP were traditional free traders, hostile to monopoly. In external policy, the Webbs endorsed the principles of empire, and were friendly with Liberal imperialists like Rosebery and Haldane, whereas Hardie and his friends passionately supported those fighting for colonial self-government, Hardie also steered clear of the Marxists of the SDF. For an old stable country like Britain, revolutionary dogma was a wholly misconceived option. In Marx himself as a pioneer, Hardie naturally found much to praise. He tried to claim that Marx’s socialism was basically evolutionary – fully compatible with parliamentary politics. But too many of his supposed followers proclaimed an ideology that was rigid and intransigent. Socialists, wrote Hardie, should ‘make war upon a system not a class’.78 Hardie had thus to define a strategy that transcended the negativism of the Lib–Labs, the intellectual detachment of the Fabians and the revolutionary programme of the Marxists. It is part of his great contribution to Labour thereafter that he was successful in so doing.
Third, Hardie also consistently emphasised the priority to be given to constitutional action. During the fierce ideological debates of 1910–14 – when doctrines of industrial unionism or syndicalism, as preached in France and the USA, had much impact in areas such as south Wales – Hardie urged restraint. He saw a kind of dangerous nihilism in the upsurge of such doctrines. Labour, he proclaimed, should use the state, not destroy it.79 The social liberation of the worker could only be achieved thus.
At the same time, Hardie was anxious to claim that industrial and political protest should proceed side by side. He took fierce issue with Philip Snowden’s view in the pages of the Labour Leader that strike action was damaging to labour and should be largely abandoned.80 On the contrary, Hardie had seen the harsh experiences of exploited working men in Wales, ranging from the rural slate workers of the Penrhyn quarries – denied the right to form unions at all – to the miners of the Welsh steam-coal valleys – prevented from receiving fair wages due to their being employed in ‘abnormal places’ at the coal face. These men were confronted with determined employers calling in violent police forces, like the dreaded ‘Glamorgans’ used at Tonypandy, and the Home Office even deployed the armed forces, who patrolled the Rhondda with fixed bayonets in 1910 and shot down six workers during a rail strike in Llanelli in 1911.
For Hardie, industrial power was an essential weapon as well. It was, after all, workers’ pressure in the pits, dockyards and factories that led to the miners’ minimum wage becoming a parliamentary priority. In Ireland, Hardie was strongly sympathetic to the strike action pursued by followers of ‘Larkinism’ among the Dublin tramway workers, whose support for their union led to violent and indiscriminate reprisals by the police. His analysis was often far from being a model of clarity, and it was often inconsistent. But he did sense that the injustices of labour were not only there to be debated in the parliamentary arena – they stemmed from fundamental inequalities emerging from the very essence of capitalism itself, which called for the mobilisation of workers’ power. Hardie was a democratic socialist who saw both the democracy and the socialism of that creed as vital for the crusade.
His final strategic insight was that Labour should, above all, pay due regard to British traditions of popular protest. He located the antecedents of the labour movement in many places, not only in the Peasants’ Revolt, Chartism or reactions to early industrialism, but also in a vibrant radical tradition shown during the American and French revolutionary wars, the anti-war campaigns of Cobden and Bright, the New Liberalism championed by Lloyd George in his own day, and the ‘liberty tree’ cherished by the common people through the ages. Hardie always showed respect for history. He had done so as a young socialist in Scotland, when he read deeply on the uprising of William Wallace in 1297 and ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase’. He was to do so again as a Welsh MP, cherishing the cultural antecedents of the Welsh people, as in the National Eisteddfod.
One model for him there was Jean Jaures of the French socialist movement, thus linking the social conflicts of Hardie’s own day with the revolutionary traditions of 1789, 1848 and 1871. Hardie also noted approvingly how Jaures worked closely with French radicals in fighting the injustices of the Dreyfus affair as Jacobins would have done 100 years before. He believed a successful Labour Party should be inspired by its radical and national predecessors. It should not sulk in its own ideological tent or threaten non-cooperation with the rest of the political world. It should encourage and associate itself with contemporary New Liberal movements of social reform. Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 aroused Hardie’s enthusiasm. With some exaggeration, Hardie thought it partly socialist in intent. He was broadly content with the progressive alliance with the Liberals up to the First World War, and lent his support to Liberal causes such as educational reform, temperance and the disestablishment of the Church in Wales.
One principle on which he was very firm was to ensure that Labour, unlike the Socialists in France, or the Geman Social Democrats, should not be an anti-clerical party. On the contrary, he himself had grown into socialism through a dissenting Protestant church in the west of Scotland, and his speeches were full of Biblical imagery, hailing the kingdom of Christ on earth. The ILP’s appeal, Clarion vans and all, was revivalist. Thus it was that, in strongly Nonconformist communities in the mining villages of West Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, the Lancashire textile towns, and, increasingly, the valleys of south Wales (all of them invincibly Liberal since the Third Reform Act of 1884), the new party found its most zealous support. Several leading Nonconformist ministers and a few important Anglican clergymen actually joined Labour, as did some theologians who championed R. J. Campbell’s ‘new theology’. Hardie understood Britain to be a land with deep roots in radicalism and populism, much of it of Christian origin. In many ways, he responded to the country’s injustices less as a politician than as a mystic, or perhaps a fin-de-siècle artist or poet – albeit an often sentimental one. While not versed in the minutiae of British history, he had the wisdom to see that it suggested essential keys to social progress. Like Nye Bevan, Hardie argued that you could only know where you were going if you understood where you had come from. Hardie spent much time denouncing tawdry Edwardian doctrines of national and imperial greatness, and was denounced as an unpatriotic extremist for it – as was Bevan years later for the phrase ‘lower than vermin’.
Hardie condemned an international arms race. He was a republican, and poured contempt on the royal family for becoming the mouthpiece of jingoism and for its links with the repressive Tsar of Russia. He was rebuked by the Speaker for making a highly personal attack on the King in the Commons, and was, for a period, excluded from royal garden parties as a punishment – events it is inconceivable Hardie would ever have wished to attend anyway. The King is said to have remarked: ‘We don’t want any bloody agitators here.’81 And yet, in his gut instincts for what British Labour was and could be, Hardie like Bevan was fundamentally a patriot and a history man.
The other area in which Hardie’s influence was centrally important was policy. This is frequently under-estimated. Hardie is too often seen as a sentimental romantic, focusing on simple values such as the joys of nature or the rural symbolism of May Day – ‘A thing of joy and beauty … a day with sport, sunshine and green fields, with the singing birds and the flowers … a sacred day devoted to the cause of Labour and humanity.’ But he was far more constructive than that, and impressed his views on the party in several key areas, even if some of them emerged as centrally important only in the longer-term future.
From his ‘cloth-capped’ (actually ‘deer-stalkered’) entry into Parliament as MP for West Ham South in 1892, Hardie put an emphasis, hitherto unknown in the House of Commons, on working-class issues. He championed many causes that remain of much relevance to Labour at the present time – a minimum wage, the ending of child poverty and slum housing, the rights of immigrant workers and of women in ‘sweated trades’. He spoke, in general terms, of the desirability of a national health service, financed from progressive redistributive taxation, not a poll tax like the 1911 National Insurance Act of Lloyd George. They should ‘tax wealth not poverty’.
Most strikingly, Hardie took up in the 1890s, and again after 1903, when trade declined, the great theme of unemployment. It was an unfamiliar concept to the early Victorians, as their economy grew and overseas competition appeared less than threatening. The very word ‘unemployment’ only first emerged in public discourse in the 1880s, around the time of the violent unemployed riots in Trafalgar Square in 1887. Hardie made several of his most notable speeches in Parliament on this issue, and received the proud accolade of being ‘the member for the unemployed’. He spoke on the topic with more passion than precision, His knowledge of economics was sketchy to the extreme – ‘Socialism is much more than either a political creed or an economic dogma,’ he once wrote82 – and his specific proposals, such as labour colonies for the unemployed along the lines of the ‘home colonies’ started at Hollesley Bay, Mayland and Laindon, would hardly have dealt convincingly with the problem. The sums Hardie proposed to assist those out of work would make only a small impression on an unemployed total he claimed to be as high as six million.
Nevertheless, Hardie gave the issue a new public prominence, while working with leftish philanthropists like the American millionaire Joseph Fels on practical schemes of outdoor relief.83 In 1905, he caused something of a sensation when, alone among Labour members and publicists, he gave support to the Unionist government’s Unemployed Workmen Bill, since, for all its shortcomings, it did affirm that the community should provide work for all those thrown out of work through the vagaries of trade. It also laid down that the cost of this should be a charge on public funds and, also, most importantly, that those receiving assistance should not suffer in their voting rights or public eligibility in general. His attitude led to fierce attacks on Hardie by his old enemy John Burns, whose own efforts to deal with unemployment at the Local Government Board under the succeeding Liberal government proved to be highly inept. But it gave the Labour Party a transcendent social cause by which it was to be uniquely identified until well after the general election of 1945, perhaps even until the inflationary fears of the 1970s. The ‘member for the unemployed’ had helped ensure that his new creation was, and would for decades remain, ‘the party for the unemployed’.
On other issues, Hardie’s legacy was to emerge most powerfully long after his death. Thus he became a courageous champion of the women’s suffrage cause, as indeed did MacDonald, Snowden and other socialists. Hardie was friendly with the Pankhurst family and worked closely with prominent suffragettes, including his private secretary and virtual housekeeper, Margaret Travers Symons. He was to be embarrassed in 1908 when she interrupted a debate in the Commons with cries of ‘Votes for women!’ and was banned from the House for two years by the Speaker. After that, there is a sign that Hardie withdrew somewhat from his close connections with the Women’s Social and Political Union, fearing that their militancy might lead them to become, for the women’s movement generally, ‘what the SDF had been to socialism’84 – a small, disruptive, doctrinaire rump.
Nevertheless, Hardie’s distinctive prominence in the women’s cause henceforth linked Labour to feminism. As chairman in 1906–7, when he challenged the authority of the party conference on the adult suffrage issue, there were many who feared that, under him, there was a danger that the emancipation of women might become Labour’s dominant cause. ‘The women’s suffragists have run away with him,’ wrote Glasier.85 Hardie devoted much thought to the women’s cause in all its aspects, assisted by his close personal involvement with the youngest of the Pankhursts, Sylvia, who became his lover. Hardie and Sylvia both saw beyond the question of the ballot when reflecting on the liberation of women: civic emancipation would lead on to social and cultural emancipation, bearing on the status of women not just as voters, but as taxpayers, workers, wives and mothers. However, the political dividend for Labour was long delayed, as the enfranchised women after 1918 invariably threw their votes behind right-wing parties. Labour, to many, seemed a macho, male party. But, in the longer term, the women’s cause became central to Labour’s identity. Again, Hardie should take much of the credit. We can speculate that egalitarian proposals such as all-women shortlists for parliamentary candidatures would have had his enthusiastic support.
Ethnic as well as gender questions were among Hardie’s priorities. He always strongly identified Labour with racial equality. He spoke out on behalf of Jewish and other immigrant refugees at the turn of the century – victims of Russian anti-Semitic pogroms, stigmatised in Britain as ‘aliens’ – and he similarly defended the Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, in France. Overseas, his was a staunch voice for colonial liberation. He championed the Boer cause strongly during the South African War. More unusually, he spoke out on behalf of the African majority, oppressed by the Boers on racial grounds, and was one of the very few MPs to criticise the South African self-government measure of 1910, as it would diminish the human rights of black Africans in Cape Colony and Natal, who would be dragged to the same level of near-servitude as their brethren in Transvaal and the Orange Free State.86 His meeting in Johannesburg in October 1907 ended in uproar and he narrowly escaped with his life. He returned to South African affairs in 1913 and 1914, condemning the policy of the South African government to use troops to intimidate striking black and ‘coloured’ workers in the mines of the Rand, and to sanction the widespread use of emergency measures and martial law – again, an area largely neglected by other British MPs.
In India, which Hardie visited just before travelling to southern Africa, he spoke out passionately on behalf of the country being governed by Indian people: the same principles should apply to India as to Ireland, whose self-government the Liberal Party had endorsed for many years. He took the same line when meeting Egyptian socialists in 1909. He worked closely with Indian nationalists such as B. G. Tilak and the Congress movement, and, as has been mentioned, was greeted with passionate enthusiasm in Madras and elsewhere as a Christ-like saviour figure. Here again, Hardie was taking a prophetic, if unpopular, line. In India, the transfer of power in 1947, for all the communal atrocities that accompanied it, was always associated specifically with the Labour Party. When James Callaghan visited India as Prime Minister in 1977, it was a badge of honour for him that he had been a minister in Attlee’s liberating government.87 In South Africa later on, the ending of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s may reasonably be seen as the culmination of a century-old humanitarian, libertarian crusade against racial injustice, within which Hardie had ensured Labour a special role. An insular late-Victorian party, dedicated to democratic socialism in one country, had been imperishably linked with colonial freedom and racial equality. In the Caribbean, in central Africa, on the Indian subcontinent and in south-east Asia, young nationalist leaders, from Grantley Adams in Barbados to Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, drew their basic political philosophy from principles set down long ago by the Edwardian Labour Party.
In the United Kingdom, Hardie’s influence on Labour’s policy was also important. He endorsed a pluralist form of socialism. He argued, as did the ILP, with its emphasis on local government, that socialism should be decentralised and devolved, with power located in the grass-roots and local communities. He wrote extensively in local newspapers such as the Merthyr Pioneer. He argued fiercely against the bureaucratic, centralised system of socialism favoured by the German Social Democrats.88 Here, the logic of Hardie’s argument was less than clear. He could hardly deny that national development programmes to protect the ‘right to work’, or welfare proposals on behalf of the ‘national minimum’ and living wage, would entail massive steps towards collectivism. But he hoped that a state-run economy could and would evolve into a form of ‘free communism’, based on each according to his own needs. The detail for an institutional framework of socialism was not Keir Hardie’s strong point – no more than it was Marx’s. But one crucial marker that he did lay down was on behalf of devolution, which he strongly supported for both Scotland and Wales. He had been a Scottish home ruler in his early years in Scotland – as had Ramsay MacDonald – and as MP for Merthyr Tydfil he had identified warmly with the national and cultural aspirations of Wales. He learned to sing the Welsh national anthem. He praised the National Eisteddfod as (he claimed) a medieval organisation to protect native Welsh bards against literary blacklegs! And he upheld Welsh home rule:
Y Ddraig Goch ar Faner Goch, the Red Dragon and the red flag. The nationalist party I have in mind is the people of Wales fighting to recover possession of the land of Wales … that is the kind of nationalism that will be emblazoned on the red flag of socialism.89
The Labour government of 1997, as it tried to fight free of the corporate unionism of 1945, could thus find its legitimate ancestry in Keir Hardie. But so, too, perhaps, could Plaid Cymru.
Hardie’s policy decisions thus had a profound, long-term impact on Labour’s programmes in government, years after his death. In one other area, however, he failed – as indeed did the working-class movement in all countries. Hardie felt himself to be an internationalist, a citizen of the world. He associated enthusiastically at the Socialist International (SI) with great leaders like Jean Jaures, August Bebel and Victor Adler. He had frequent personal contact, too, with the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, and Sam Gompers of the American Federation of Labor in the United States. Hardie visited America three times.90
Along with other Labour leaders, Hardie worked closely with socialists in Germany and elsewhere to try to defuse international crises such as the Anglo-German naval confrontation of 1909. The corollary, Hardie argued, was that the workers should lead the international quest for a permanent peace. He criticised the building up of the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance, which threatened to plunge a thriving world, in which the workers were gaining affluence and political power, into a maelstrom of carnage. With his close friend, the French socialist Edouard Vaillant, he attempted to persuade the SI to campaign for a worldwide strike against war.91
In August 1914, it was painfully evident that he had not succeeded. The British labour movement, like its corresponding factions in all other belligerent countries, flocked to the ‘patriotic’ cause, and workers volunteered to join the army in their hundreds of thousands. Even four years later, after so much slaughter, the bulk of working-class opinion remained committed to fighting the war. Hardie himself became a political outcast, like MacDonald and others in the ILP, reviled for his anti-war views.
He died, psychologically shattered, in September 1915 – a tragic, very old man of fifty-nine. The anti-war views of Hardie became more acceptable as post-war revulsion set in; another courageous dissenter, MacDonald, became Labour’s symbol of the brave new world, and served as Prime Minister on two occasions. Hardie, like Labour in general from the Great War in 1914 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, found a country at war very hard to reconcile with socialist principles. Bernard Shaw spoke poignantly and eloquently of Hardie’s fate after his death. ‘What else could Keir Hardie do but die?’ But Shaw added: ‘Like John Brown’s body, his soul goes marching on.’
Sylvia Pankhurst wrote her own touching, highly personal tribute: ‘He has been the greatest human being of our time.’92
Hardie, then, was a commanding non-leader. In strategy and in policy, his influence over the nascent, struggling Labour Party was immense. He was to be Labour’s undisputed folk hero down the generations. His character and style embodied his message even more than his policies. A Welsh admirer, Wil Jon Edwards, wrote that ‘the man and his gospel were indivisible’93 – as we have seen, Biblical analogies came naturally to those reflecting on Hardie’s career.
Hugh Dalton was one middle-class undergraduate converted on the spot to socialism after seeing Hardie, in 1907, confronting a rowdy and violent audience of wealthy bullies at Cambridge in the mould of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club. Dalton was deeply moved by Hardie’s sublime courage, ‘his simplicity of speech and thought and faith’.94 Clement Attlee, employed as a social worker in the slums of the East End, was another such convert.
Through example, persuasion and evangelism, Hardie made socialists by the tens of thousands. For all his limitations of intellect and temperament, he embodied the ethic of democratic socialism as few others have done.
There was one electrifying moment at the 1914 ILP annual conference (the twenty-first), held appropriately at St George’s Hall, Bradford (like the first, in 1893), with Hardie presiding. On the last day, he spoke to an audience of children. He told them to aim for a life of generosity and comradeship. They should love their fellow men and hate injustice, cruelty and war. ‘If these were my last words, lads and lasses, I would say them to you: “Live for that better day.”’95 This complicated anti-leader was a unique moral force in leading the country there.
66 Alfred George Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, London, Rivers, 1908, p. 86.
67 Bruce Glasier, J. Keir Hardie MP: A Memorial, Manchester, National Labour Press, 1915, p. 50.
68 Ramsay MacDonald to Bruce Glasier, 21 July 1906 (Independent Labour Party Archive, London School of Economics Library).
69 Keir Hardie to Bruce Glasier, 8 October 1907 (Independent Labour Party Archive, London School of Economics Library).
70 John Burns’s diary, 26 September 1915 (British Library, Add.MSS. 46,337).
71 Kenneth O. Morgan, Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, p. 46.
72 Caroline Benn, Keir Hardie, London, Hutchinson, 1992, pp. 236–9.
73 Wil Jon Edwards, From the Valley I Came, London, Angus & Robertson, 1956, pp. 120–21.
74 Private interview with the late Lord Brockway, 19 March 1974.
75 Miss W.H. Irwin to Ramsay MacDonald, 4 May 1899 (National Archives, MacDonald Papers, 5/6).
76 Keir Hardie, The ILP and All About It, London, Independent Labour Party, 1909, pp. 6, 11–12; My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance, London, Independent Labour Party, 1909, p. 12.
77 Labour Leader, 3 February, 16 June 1900.
78 Labour Leader, 2 September 1904.
79 The Metropolitan, New York, June 1912, pp. 13–14 (copy in Tamiment Library, New York City).
80 Labour Leader, 2 October, 23 October 1913.
81 Bruce Glasier’s diary, 7 May 1910 (University of Liverpool Library).
82 Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism, London, 1907, pp. 25–6.
83 Arthur Power Dudden, Joseph Fels and the Single-Tax Movement, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1971, pp. 65–6; Mary Fels, Joseph Fels: His Life Work, New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1920.
84 Keir Hardie to Bruce Glasier, 7/8 January 1908 (Glasier Papers).
85 Bruce Glasier’s diary, 30 November 1906, 19 January 1907.
86 Labour Leader, 17 April 1908.
87 Conversations with Lord Callaghan in the 1990s.
88 Morgan, op. cit., 1975, p. 209.
89 Keir Hardie, The Red Dragon and the Red Flag, Merthyr, Independent Labour Party, 1912.
90 Morgan, op. cit., 1975, pp. 185–7.
91 Edouard Vaillant to Keir Hardie, 1 August 1912 (Independent Labour Party Archive).
92 Merthyr Pioneer, 9 October 1915; Workers’ Dreadnought, 16 October 1915 (material in Sylvia Pankhurst archive B/12, Institute of Social History, Amsterdam).
93 Wil Jon Edwards, op. cit., p. 111.
94 Hardie, op. cit., 1912.
95 Keir Hardie to Rose Davies, 1914 (Glamorgan Record Office, Cardiff, D/Dxik,30/27).